digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
As Jia Tolentino wrote: “As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.”
The Analog Revival Did Not Take Place
Mir’s, acting in the world replaced by mere digital presence.
Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.
Anne Applebaum • Twilight of Democracy
So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological term for something that makes it easier to do something else. And we have platforms designing their affordances for negativity to spread by targeting high arousal, engagement, emotions. Humans follow... See more
Does Virality Concern Reality?
We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet.
MLIScardcatalogforlife.substack.com
The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.
Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
us versus them tribalism
The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers—not the aspirational
... See moreNaomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
The digitally converged world is simultaneously hot and cool, real and faked, commercial and nonprofit, entertaining and political, interactive and passive—it blurs and melds everything together. Our infinite commercial choices and personal expressions are layered through complex networked relationships among media.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
the cultural chaos of fragmentation that displaced the comfortable universal norms of appointment television.